Women Who Inspire Us
Internet

Mia Di Giovanni

Mia Di Giovanni is a founder, president and CEO of Smoothsale, a software infrastructure company that provides merchants with tools to instantly communicate and close sales online. Di Giovanni is an Internet start-up veteran having served on the senior leadership teams of two large-scale industry successes, GeoCities, Inc. (sold to Yahoo! in May 1999) and XOOM.com (sold to NBCi in November 1999). She launched her Internet career as a founding partner of CMG @Ventures (which became CMGI @Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of CMGI, Inc. NASDAQ: CMGI) where she worked with more than a dozen early-stage companies including Lycos, GeoCities, TeleT, Vicinity and NetCarta, among others.

She left CMGI to join GeoCities as chief technical integrator where she launched the company’s first e-commerce initiative (GeoStore) and integrated key technologies from CMGI portfolio companies (Lycos search, Freemark email, Blaxxun VRML chat, etc.). She also served as the company’s advertising sales director where she closed major deals with Microsoft, Amazon and Intel. At XOOM.com, she served as general manager for e-commerce where she was responsible for all strategic partnerships and co-branding programs. She also served as national account director where she created a private label strategy for personal homepages, email and XOOM.com chat products.

When Di Giovanni isn’t working with hot growth start-ups, she is a world class amateur polo player. She plays competitively at the famous El Dorado Polo Club, Palm Springs, California and in 1999 was part of the all-women’s team that made history by winning the finals of the largest co-ed league tournament. Di Giovanni owns 15 polo ponies that she trains and houses in the Bay Area.

She holds a B.S. degree in engineering from Cornell University.